Perfection
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3.9 • 56 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Notable Book of 2025
A 2025 International Booker Prize Shortlist Nominee
Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for Translated Literature
Winner of AIRMAIL's Inaugural Tom Wolfe Literary Prize for Fiction
A scathing, provocative novel about contemporary existence by a rising star in Italian literature.
Anna and Tom, an expat couple, have fashioned a dream life for themselves in Berlin. They are young digital "creatives" exploring the excitements of the city, freelancers without too many constraints, who spend their free time cultivating house plants and their images online. At first, they reasonably deduce that they've turned their passion for aesthetics into a viable, even enviable career, but the years go by, and Anna and Tom grow bored. As their friends move back home or move on, so their own work and sex life—and the life of Berlin itself—begin to lose their luster. An attempt to put their politics into action fizzles in embarrassed self-doubt. Edging closer to forty, they try living as digital nomads only to discover that, wherever they go, "the brand of oat milk in their flat whites was the same."
Perfection—Vincenzo Latronico's first book to be translated into English—is a scathing novel about contemporary existence, a tale of two people gradually waking up to find themselves in various traps, wondering how it all came to be. Was it a lack of foresight, or were they just born too late?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Latronico dissects the Berlin expat scene in his biting and insightful English-language debut. In the early 2000s, 20-somethings Anna and Tom leave their unnamed southern European city for Berlin, where they work remotely on freelance graphic design projects. The couple are exhilarated by the city, and easily form friendships with other expats. They spend weekdays working out of their beautiful and affordable apartment and weekends at art openings, restaurants, and parks, convinced that "the city was inexhaustible." As the years pass, however, the couple becomes increasingly disenchanted. Despite good intentions, they can do nothing to help the rising tide of migrants arriving in Berlin, and their friends begin to drift away, either to raise families or move home. As Anna and Tom approach 40, they grow desperate to find meaning. Latronico's portrayal of his rootless and searching characters is frank and clear-eyed, revealing the limits of the idealism of their youth, when "beauty and pleasure seem as inextricable from daily life as particles suspended in a liquid." Fans of The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş ought to check this out.
Customer Reviews
Immersive Perfection
Just like a great movie sucks you into another life for a couple of hours and leaves you walking out of the theater in someone else’s shoes, until reality returns; Perfection drew me into the world of a young couple as they build a life together in another country.